Chapter Text
A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the trees that encircled the berm. Every tiny sound put Oliver more and more on edge. Cheryl was relaxing, comfortably molded into his reclining body. They had laid out a blanket in the picturesque spot hours ago. He had filled the time until the midnight deadline with a long languid session of passionate love making. Their coupling had changed in the past few weeks from fast and furious fucking into a more sensual exchange of warmth and pleasure. Oliver knew he would miss all this once the evening had all run its course. Their time together had been more fun than he had expected and as a travelling companion he had forgotten how much he had missed having an intelligent and practical woman around.
A cold wind blew up from the south and Oliver felt Elio’s arrival long before he could see him. Mafalda purposely made more noise than she should have walking towards them, and Oliver also felt Elio’s growing fury at the woman’s obvious misbehavior. At the moment they caught sight of each other across the darkened grass, it all came rushing back. The joy Oliver had felt for the boy who had shifted his life from the ordinary into the extraordinary. His heart felt a glowing pride at seeing him again. His Elio. His Sire.
It had been almost fifteen years and of course neither had changed an ounce. Elio’s strong but fine features were framed in his soft wavy tresses. His striking jawline that Oliver had once peppered with kisses stood proudly on his graceful neck. Oliver searched for his elegant fingers that had always been his weakness. So strong and lively, almost magical in their translucent paleness. How could two twin marble-like hands produce such extraordinary beauty at the piano and then in the next minute tear the throat out of some mortal.
***
After his death and transformation, Elio took Oliver on a three-month tour which culminated in a hunting trip to Paris. Elio had become so much more energetic and invigorated in the first few years after he took on his younger lover and playmate. The ‘quickening’ for a vampire is almost like the feeling that mortals call ‘love’. The older and world-weary vampire takes on the younger vampire’s passion for the age and with fresh ‘joie de vivre’, the two hurtle into an almost explosive frenzy of activity.
Nothing Oliver could do would compare to the glee of vengeance that Elio would inflict again and again on the general Parisian populous. His hatred had centuries to steep into a venom so malevolent and sinister that the City authorities started to question the safety of the people inside the city walls. Little did they know they bore the brunt of the anger of a man whom their predecessors allowed to be sold in the market square centuries earlier. Vampires have a long memory for past damages and misdemeanors and Elio was enjoying repaying the lack of care that had befallen him at their hands.
They trained in the hunt, the stalk, the chase down, the kill and finally the clean escape. Despite Oliver’s large frame, he had become perfectly stealthy and had developed quickly under the tutelage of Elio. His honed techniques would go on to serve him well and make him a very successful and well-fed vampire.
Paris was awash with blood. They both took much pleasure in the blood lust they felt and would rutt like rabbits after each successful kill. This ‘feeding and fucking frenzy’ became the central motif of their time together.
***
In the quiet of the berm they stood face to face. Locked in a wordless battle of will. Elio broke the deadlock by looking towards Cheryl. “Oh, you bought me a gift! Such a pretty little bauble,” he mused, grabbing Cheryl’s face firmly in his hands and inspecting her features. “Very lovely, but she is a pleasure that will have to wait until later.”
Elio pushed Cheryl towards Mafalda, who rushed up to her quickly and instinctively wrapped a protective arm around the girl and gave Elio a Neapolitan glare that would make fruit wither on the vine.
“You have finally answered my call. You are very infuriating the way that you willfully disregard my simple requests!” he continued in a placid but direct tone.
“We had not parted on the best terms and you had just killed my best friend. Would you expect me to return willingly? You have to be joking!” Oliver replied.
“Vimini had it coming. That horrid little child always dragging you down to that rock. Always plotting and scheming and counselling you against me,” Elio said rapidly.
“She did nothing of the sort. She was much kinder about you than you were about her. Sucking her blood, day after day, slowly bleeding her dry. The doctors called it Leukemia; I call it your blood lust,” Oliver spat back at him.
“Oh, I see you haven’t forgiven me then.” Elio’s annoyance was rising.
Oliver looked at his feet and shook his head. “She was my only true friend here.” He sighed.
“Oh… Boo-hoo, poor Oliver. Lost his little friend,” Elio taunted him facetiously.
“You can be so vile sometimes Elio,” Oliver said his name.
No one could say Elio’s name the way Oliver did. It hurt him to feel the flutter in his stomach as he said his name. He had not felt that feeling since the moment Oliver had left him.
“And you are so human. You disgust me!” Elio spat back and turned away to attempt to mask his own feelings, which of course didn’t work.
“Just tell me what you want from me, and I will be on my way,” Oliver stated, trying to take control of the conversation.
“Don’t push me, you impertinent pup!” Elio hissed with a pang of regret. “I made you and I can break you just as easily!”
Elio’s mood had shifted, and he pulled himself up to full height which he bore down on Oliver, making the younger man cower and show homage to his Sire.
Elio’s tone changed immediately to the soft and honeyed one he had begun with.
Looking off into the middle distance, Elio began to speak again.
“I have roamed this world for more than seventeen hundred years and I know when it is time to move on. I am tired of this place and these people. The nest can’t continue the way it has. The town is becoming suspicious of me, as ‘they’ age,” he gestured towards Mafalda, “And I don’t. Italy is also changing and to me it’s not for the better. I long for new places and to taste some fresh blood.”
He continued, “Since more and more fat stupid Americans are buying up the houses in these parts, no one will notice you taking over mine. Your task will be to modernize and refresh the Villa in preparation for my return. Fifty years or so should be long enough for anyone who knows me to shuffle off their mortal coils and I will be forgotten. I have had the papers drawn up to change the deeds and titles. Do you understand what I am asking you?”
Oliver stammers in a state of shock, “You’re giving me the Villa!”
“Yes, for a specific amount of time. Then I will return and reclaim it.”
With lightning speed Elio moved in on Oliver. He grabbed his face in both his hands and kissed him hard and deeply. The kiss turned into erratic passionate biting at each other’s lips. They clawed at the other’s bodies and hair in an animalistic battle for primal and natural lust. Time stopped as a trickle of blood escaped Oliver’s bruised lips. As if to seal their deal with an exchange of blood, Elio playfully lapped at Oliver bloodied lips, reminiscent of what occurred here 20 years ago.
Still holding Oliver in a tight embrace, Elio turned to Cheryl. “Girl, you can have him for the rest of ‘your life’ but remember that I own that ass and I can reclaim it any time I choose to,” Elio stated gleefully.
“Oliver, you have a lot of work to do and I have some unfinished business to attend to. So I will take my leave of you. Let us not say goodbye but instead say ‘adieu’ until next time.” Elio turned and was gone in a flash that left the mortals a little confused and Oliver a little saddened to see his once great love go.
Oliver walked over to Cheryl and Mafalda and sighed in relief, for the evening had turned out very differently to how he thought it would. Going down on one knee in the cool green grass, Oliver took Cheryl’s slightly shaking hand in both of large pale ones.
“Cheryl… honey, I know we haven’t known each other for very long but will you stay with me here in Northern Italy and be my wife?” he asked almost too earnestly.
She sighed her reply which drew an enormous smile from each of them, “Well, of course Oliver!”
The three walked back towards the villa together. Elio had left the papers to be signed and notarized on the dining table as he said he would. Oliver took Cheryl on a tour through their future home and out onto the terrace, where you could see the sea lapping at the rocky beach that Oliver had once thought of as heaven.
Mafalda rushed into the lower bedroom which Annella had occupied since the death of her husband and discovered part of the unfinished business that Elio had spoken of. She patted her cold hand and closed the woman’s eyes for the final time.
“Such a shame, she always loved a wedding,” Mafalda said in her distinctive Neapolitan dialect.